Super Totally Rad | Totally Rad collection | Sue Plumb

Hi everyone, it’s Sue Plumb here to share my latest design team project with you. As we all excitedly await the gorgeous new ‘Daydream’ collection, I have been inspired by some of my fellow team members who have been getting ready by doing some stash-busting. So I decided to have a dig into my own stash and see what I could find to use up. I finally settled on the ‘Totally Rad’ collection. For those of you who have been Cocoa Vanilla fans for a long time, you might have some of this hiding in your stash too; and for everyone who missed this range the first time around, you can now purchase it as a digital collection HERE 

Here is my layout “Super Totally Rad”…

When it came to the background, I was limited with paper choices so I chose to use the sun burst style pattern on the “Good Times” paper from the ‘Boys Rule’ collection instead. I had a couple of photos from my boys recent 8th birthday, and I thought the colours of the cake would make it a fun subject to pair with the colourful ‘Totally Rad’ collection.

Based on the limited paper I had left to work with, I decided to go with a vertical design using a piece of the cute camera print “Happy Snaps” paper for the focal area of my page. Alongside that, I added a strip of the yellow chevron print which was the reverse side of the cameras. I also added a second strip of the chevrons along he right edge of my page. Because the photos I was working with were different orientations, I wanted to keep them contained on the vertical strip of paper and then fill around them.

The key to keeping this busy design cohesive, was to ensure that all the different elements I planned to use needed to be touching each other. This cascading arrangement meant that the viewer’s eye was automatically drawn down through the design. I used a mix of die cut ephemera pieces, as well as pieces that I had fussy cut from the “Mix Tape” cut apart sheet. I also used a flair button and some enamel shapes.

I am not a huge fan of symmetry in my work, so to balance out how heavy my design was along the central line of the page, I added a small embellishment cluster in the bottom right corner of my page, along with my hand written journalling.

I finished off with some black ink splatters and by stamping the phrase happy birthday to you a few times around the page. I am really happy with the clean simplicity of this page, but also with the fact I got to bust some stash and re-visit a collection that I loved.

I will be back again with another share in a couple of weeks time…and expect a certain new collection to be the star of the show! Until then, happy scrapping!